Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance / Edition 2

by David Norbrook

Overview

Renaissance English poetry was closely involved with affairs of state: some poets held high office, others wrote to influence those in power and to sway an increasingly independent public opinion. In this revised edition of his groundbreaking study, David Norbrook offers a clear account of the issues that engaged the passions of such leading figures as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Milton, and provides introductions to a host of neglected writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199247196
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/07/2002
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	9.26(w) x 6.36(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Oxford University

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Revised EditionPreface1. The 'Utopia' and Radical Humanism2. The Reformation and Prophetic Poetry3. 'The Shepheardes Calender': Prophecy and the Court4. Sidney and Political Pastoral5. 'The Faerie Queene' and Elizabethan Politics6. Voluntary Servitude: Fulke Greville and the Arts of Power7. Jonson and the Jacobean Peace, 1603-168. The Spenserians and King James, 1603-169. Crisis and Reaction, 1617-2810. The Politics of Milton's Early PoetryChronological TableIndex

Editorial Reviews

"One of the most important critical books of the last twenty years.... The book concludes with a characteristically thoughtful and generous afterword on developments in the field. It will be an education for all those interested in historically based literary studies to observe Norbrook thinking through these developments."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Praise for the previous edition: "This bold, finely researched and well-written book should have a decisive effect on our thinking about the poetry of the English Renaissance."—Frank Kermode, Times Literary Supplement

"This is a successfully ambitious book.... makes better sense than any I know of the relation of poetry in this period to the pre-revolutionary world in which the poets lived.'"—Christopher Hill, Notes and Queries

From the Publisher